In U.S. Pat. No. 3,270,190 Lambert discloses a securities evaluator which is mechanically programmed with ten years of data for securities. Based on a formula to fit the data of prior years, the inventor claims the high and low stock price for the coming year can be determined from the estimated range of variables input by the user for the coming year. The evaluator has no means of having the financial data contained therein automatically updated.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,414,838 Kolton et al. disclose a system for extracting historical market information with condition and attributed windows. The system includes facilities for including domain knowledge in a query, such as market knowledge of calendar events, holidays, triple-witching hours and option expiration dates. Additional facilities enable the user to include dates of political elections, date of issuance and value of company earning reports and the like in the query. The dates from which a user can choose to extract historical information are determined by the system, and unlike the present invention, do not offer the user the ability to randomly choose time points between data points chosen by the user.
Chennault (U.S. Pat. No. 5,930,774) discloses a method and computer program for evaluating mutual fund portfolios to enable an investor to determine the diversity, or lack thereof, of at least two mutual funds. The invention determines whether the funds are really different from each other, or if the funds include similar positions or securities in different market sectors, such as, for example, consumer goods, energy or pharmaceuticals, determines just how different these funds actually are from one another.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,946,666 (Nevo et al.) discloses a system for the simultaneous monitoring and subsequent analysis of financial securities to provide a basis for future investment or divestiture. The system analyzes data taken from time periods such as seconds, minutes, hours, or days to longer periods of a year or more.
The Nevo et al. system appears to limit the number of securities to be displayed at any particular time to three (3), in contrast to the present invention which can analyze and display data from up to several dozen securities. Nevo et al. do not explicitly explain how the sampling period is modified, whereas the present invention includes a number of different ways of determining the sampling period, ranging from fixed periods of time to random time periods.
Black et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 6,012,042) discloses a data conversion device for converting both technical and fundamental data about a security into a unified format for analysis by an analysis process engine. The invention creates records for each calendar day, by the steps of deleting a plurality of technical data records from a multiplicity of technical data records, and inserting a fundamental data value into the multiplicity of records, in order to correct for “nil” values that would occur when no data is available for a particular security at a particular date. The analysis process engine processes the disparate data according to a set of rules, and the results are forwarded to a display for viewing or used for further analysis.
The present invention permits a user to compare up to 126 securities simultaneously. The present invention offers the user an option to choose any start and end date (as opposed to a preset default sampling period), and the ability to randomly choose additional dates to use during the comparison process. Further, the present invention enables the user to compare the performance of multiple types of securities, such as equities and mutual funds, simultaneously.